Officials Promise an End to School Water Fountain Saga

15 Jersey City public schools and facilities were set to have their water fountains lead free and operating by November, but they remain shut off. Now these fountains—plus those in 25 of the district’s other schools that had been inactivated due to threats from lead—are scheduled to be back on by March 1.

“This past November, the district had a press release saying that the fountains will be opened in 30 days, but I went back to McNair in December over break, and there was no progress being made,” said Harshal Rajesh Agrawal, a recent McNair high school graduate and local activist on the issue.

Agrawal questions why the repairs took so long.

“Given common sense and my limited technical understanding of the situation, I would think the fountains at McNair should’ve been opened a few months ago. The filters were installed and tested and the results came back clean.”

It turns out that Agrawal’s assessment was correct.

“The water pipes coming into McNair were all resolved a while ago, and there was no work required by the JCMUA,” said Hudson County Freeholder Joel Torres in an email.

“The reason for the delay was that there were fountains in other schools that still needed to be reviewed to make sure they were fully remediated. The superintendent didn’t want to do a piecemeal type of process and wanted to turn on the fountains in every school at the same time. Therefore, they’re finalizing this review to turn them on this month,” Torres added.

The city has spent $1,800,000 on bottled water since lead was first detected in the schools in 2006, and the board has not said how much more these remaining repairs and related purchases will wind up costing.

“It could be as low as $4-$5 million. It could be as high as $15 million,” said former Board President Sudhan Thomas in November 2019.